Colourful Tabs in Screen
A while ago I posted about screen, and included my .screenrc file. I got some teasing for this, since the tabs show up pink. In fact this .screenrc file is one I stole from somewhere a few years ago and didn’t really think much about the colours. Since then I’ve fiddled with the colours and now use different colours on different servers, which is a nice little addition.
Its really easy to do – using the .screenrc from my previous post – just replace all the M and m characters in the last line with the colour you’d like. I started off with something like this:
Y is for Yellow
replacing m with y and M with Y I get:
Green and Cyan
I’ve also used g/G and c/C codes for other servers, which looks something like this:
Titles
I seem to be keen on subtitles in blog posts, but I’ve not labelled many of my screen tabs in these examples (I have no idea why, I usually do). The yellow example has one where one of the tabs is named and this is really helpful once you get past about three tabs and start losing which one was tailing the apache logs! To label a tab in screen, go to that tab and then ctrl+a, shift+a and you are typing in the box. Enjoy :)
Although I kinda like the colors for tabs, I think it’s overkill to have different colors on different servers. To be hounest, I think the name of the machine you’re working on (on the left) is clear enough when working with it.
The only thing I tend to dislike in screen, is that it’s rather tedious hitting ^a A to rename the screen. If anyone knows how to accomplish auto-renaming, I’d be happy to hear :)
Berry__: For normal people that is probably true but I add all sorts of clues which are different per-server, and still find myself regularly confused about which machine I’m logged in to …